BECOME A GREAT STORYTELLER

Storyteller, is that really important for success in entrepreneurship?

Well, it's much more important than I ever imagined. It's really, really important to perfect your story to both hire the best people, get the best investors, close your customers, motivate your team, you need a story that makes your business feel inevitable. It's a much bigger factor in success than I ever imagined because your story and your brand are what you use to move your company forward.

When I was in college, I had to take a public speaking course and I was terrified, absolutely terrified. Even though I was speaking to my friends about something that I knew very, very well. I happen to be building loudspeakers in college and I was just talking about my loudspeaker designs so I was completely comfortable with the material. I was terrified to stand up in front of the class and explain that, to 20 of my peers. But that one class, Engineering Presentations E10, was so valuable to me to get me over that fear and help me learn how important it was to communicate my thoughts.

Now, I've learned in my career, every single business I start, I’m pitching my heart out. Again, I'm pitching it out all the time again, not just to investors, not just to business partners, but all the time. And I learn from every single one of those presentations.

I recently had to give about 15 presentations on a company and I saw how much better my presentation was the 15th time than the first time. And you should always be looking to get feedback and learn how to make your story sound better find out what didn’t resonate, what didn’t work, how can I make that make more sense.

As you refine that, you will find you can get the best employees, the best team members, the best investors, best customers, just by making your story match your product and feel more inevitable and make the whole story makes sense in a way that really, really changes the trajectory of your company.